Airplanes, cats, guns, war, the more than occasional rant about the kleptocracy of President Spanky and his party of treason, the spinelessness of the Democraps and ramblings about anything else that flits through the somewhat offbeat mind of an armed lesbian pinko as she slides down the Razor Blade of Life.Caveat lector.

Words of Advice:

"Never Feel Sorry For Anyone Who Owns an Airplane."-- Tina Marie

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

"Flying the Airplane is More Important than Radioing Your Plight to a Person on the GroundWho is Incapable of Understanding or Doing Anything About It." -- Unknown

"There seems to be almost no problem that Congress cannot, by diligent efforts and careful legislative drafting, make ten times worse." -- Me

No doubt the SEC has drafted up the harsh letter of admonition that they will send out, following their investigation.

Unless, of course, R-money is elected president. Then the SEC will send over a few cases of champagne. (H/T)

Five years after the economy began sliding down, over three years since the banking system damn near fell apart because of those asswipes and not a single solitary bankster is in jail. The only thing that they've been able to nail any of those goniffs over is insider-trading, which is sort of like sending Ted Bundy to jail for illegal weapons possession.

Congress is bitching, to some extent, at the costs of the development program. What they're not considering is that a railgun would be the first non-incremental change in naval artillery in five hundred years. The muzzleloaders of the 16th Century lasted until the 19th Century, when the development of mass-production of steel led to the practicality of breechloaders. Breechloading permitted the use of rifling and the use of steel permitted the guns to withstand the higher pressures of both firing rifled projectiles and smokeless powder. For smaller guns came fixed and semi-fixed ammunition. The advances since then have been in gun mount automation and improved fire control. But the basics of shooting a naval rifle at a target today would be familiar to a naval officer from the Spanish-American War.

The railgun changes all that. Some of the issues, such as how one provides massive amounts of burst power to a device, are not unfamiliar. There have been sonars that required their own energy storage devices to power them. The idea of getting rid of powder magazines is a pretty attractive one; I don't doubt that is a major, and less-publicized, reason for the Navy's interest in railguns. Damage control isn't very sexy.

Developing electronic guidance package that can survive a gigantic acceleration rate isn't a new problem. Developing one that can also survive a humongous electromagnetic field as well as crushing acceleration is another story. So the concept that a railgun can shoot guided munitions over a few hundred miles is something of which I am rather skeptical. But without guidance, then it's just a modern version of the Paris Gun at those ranges.

I can see the protest signs in other states: "What's wrong with our trees, Mittens?" Of course, is someone were to ask him about it, he'd explain how the palm trees in New Orleans are the right height and so are the sequoyas in California. For if there is anything that ol' Willard can do, it is flip-flop, pander and lie at the drop of a byte.

Still, a presidential candidate pandering over the height of trees? This shit is kind of embarrassing. Can one of Cylon Mitt's programmers see if they can do a little percussive adjustment to Mitt's CPU?*
____________________________* I recommend using a framing hammer.

None of his recent gaffes, to my mind, come close to the "I've been unemployed since 2006 (although I'm worth $250 million and I get paid $20 million a year in investment income[and pay less than 15% in taxes])" whopper. But between the gaffes and the outright lies, almost to the point that his epitaph will read "here lies Mitt Romney, as usual", there has to be hundreds of hours of anti-Romney attack video that he himself has provided.

Meanwhile, the GOP party elites are close to shitting their pants at the idea of Santorum winning the nomination. I fear it, as well. Not because I give a shit what happens to the GOP, for on the contrary, the sooner that collection of cranks is consigned to the trash and a genuine center-right party arises cannot happen too soon for my taste.

No, I fear it because there is always a possibility that Frothy might win. And then we'd have a president who will make every effort to drag this country back to the 15th Century. Santorum has made it clear as glass that his presidency would be guided by the tenets of his religion, not by the Constitution or the laws of the land.

And that, I submit, is ultimately very bad for anyone who does not adhere to Ayatollah Rick's exact views. We went down that road in some of the American colonies in the 17th Century; the Founding Fathers were well aware of the dangers inherent in a faith-based government. The "no established religion" clause of the First Amendment wasn't put in there for giggles.

Finally, could someone enlighten me as to why the Southern Evangelicals like Santorum? I didn't grow up in the South, but I have friends who did, and they told me that the Southern Evangelicals regarded Catholics as idolators and not true Christians. Catholics there were regarded by the Evangelicals as almost being as outside of Christianity as Jews and Mormons. Catholic and Jewish kids stuck together for mutual protection (and there was a lot of intermarriage as a result).

Saturday, February 25, 2012

The government in Iceland forced the banks to write down loans to a maximum of 110 percent of existing property value. The banksters and the politicians who facilitated the Icelandic real estate bubble are being prosecuted.

In this country, however, it is the banksters whose interests remain paramount. It is pretty much a bipartisan endeavor to make sure that the bankers themselves feel no pain, from bailouts to sweetheart deals to ensure that they never face any accountability for their massive ponzi schemes. The banksters in this country took their ginormous payouts from all sorts of schemes and then have been laughing all the way to the Hamptons while the taxpayers foot the bill. Not a single one of the big mortgage fraudsters has been prosecuted. Oh, the S.E.C. has had stern words for some of them, but that's as far as it has gone.

Iceland had the right of it. But then again, their government, unlike ours, does not exist to serve corporate interests.

So why the big neocon drumbeat for yet another war? Have we not shed enough blood and treasure to slake the bloodthirstiness of the blasted souls of the Kagans?

Maybe the neocons are trying to destroy this country from the inside, by getting us to be embroiled in so many wars that our economy collapses and they can finally institute a religious-themed plutocracy?

I swing by my local gun shoppe to pick up some cleaning supplies. I overheard the salesman telling a customer that 5.56mm black guns have suddenly become unavailable and so has ammunition for them.

So either the quadrennial "zOMG, the Democrats are gonna take our gunz" panic is beginning early this time around, or there is panic buying over something else.

Update" The "something else" seems to be a critter called the "web bot", which has apparently predicted 25 of the last four catastrophes. The Tin-Foil Hat Brigade is convinced that World War 3 will begin on March 2nd. (Google it if you wish, I'm not linking to those folks.)

Instability in the Middle East always causes oil prices to rise.* The prospect of a war with Iran this summer is not helping the moods of the pirates speculators.

If you want to find an example of this hypocrisy in one bag of meat, you need only look at Newt Gingrich, who is both whining about gas prices and Iran. You cannot have both low gas prices and a massive war in the Persian Gulf, and any politician who is telling you otherwise is either so full of shit that he's about explode due to over-pressurization or he thinks that you are dumber than a rotting stump.
_________________* That, and those ghouls known as "speculators", who are driving up the price of oil.

No, I think that the GOP will lose with Santorum for the same reason that they lost a century ago: The party elite will shudder at the candidate whom the party's grass roots have chosen and they will rig the game to choose someone else. That will not sit well with Santorum's supporters, who will not go along with the anointing by the bosses.

Whether or not Santorum will accept the nomination of a third party will be another question that he'll have to consider.

On the other hand, if the party bosses pull the same trick against Romney, I don't imagine that most people will give a shit. The one consistent thing about ol' Rmoney is that nobody seems to really like him. Romney's strongest argument for being the nominee is "it's my turn", because the GOP's tradition is that the nominee is the clown who came in second the last time around.*

________________________________* Think about it. It's been that way since Ford. McCain came in second in 2000 and was the nominee in `08. Dole came in second in `88 and was the nominee in `96. Bush I came in second in `80 and was the nominee in `88. Reagan came in second in `76 and was the nominee in `80. The one outlier was Buchanan, who came in second in `92 and `96, and who arguably was denied his turn for having the temerity to primary a sitting president (and who was privately blamed by the GOP for weakening Bush enough for Clinton to win). The same stench of challenging a sitting president didn't seem to attach to Reagan, but he did come in second in `68, so it could be argued that Watergate had displaced Reagan in the Unofficial Line of Succession.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

I probably didn't make it clear, but I was visiting a friend for awhile when all this came about. Yesterday I drove home, with Jake and George riding in their carriers in the back seat. Gracie used to ride in her carrier in the front passenger seat; I would sometime spoke a finger through the door and scratch her head. The first part of the drive, with the empty seat next to me, made it all fresh, but it passed. At home I had a small set of steps so she could get onto the couch (Gracie had arthritis) as well as the cat condo that was one of her favorite places, those immediately went into the dumpster out back.

Other stuff blew up yesterday in a friend's sibling's life, so that, sad as it may be to say, has been a bit of a distraction. Last night, being the first night home since Gracie died, I took a sleeping pill to make sure that the yakkity part of my brain shut the hell up for the night. So I got a decent night's sleep.

Each day is a little better. Maybe not by much, but better.

I gather that Frothy screwed the pooch in the latest showup of the passengers who have been riding in the GOP Presidential Clown Car. Someone else is surely blogging effectively about that.

I suppose I also should comment about the inherent stupidity of Republicans who have been screaming for months that Forceful Measures Must Be Taken against Iran and now, that tensions are ratcheting up, those very same Republicans are whining about the rise in gas prices, as in just what the frak did they think would happen to the price of oil when there is a prospect of yet another war in the Persian Gulf. Somebody's probably written a good piece on that, as well.

Anyway, what I wanted to let you know is that the Saturday Caturday will be suspended for awhile. Maybe a week, maybe longer. Gracie, with her big green eyes, was a dream to photograph and so, to a lesser degree, was Rocky. They were half-siblings, of litters roughly 16 months apart. Their mother was a feral cat who was a very pretty cat in her own right. (You might remember Gracie's feral sister, Sweetie.)

The survivors in our households are not as photogenic.

These are the last decent photos I have of each of them. This photo of Gracie was taken the day before she passed.

The cancer was on the other side of her jaw. But in looking at this photo, it seems to me that her mouth was open, just a tad. It had to have been at least discomforting, if not painful for her. But she was her usual loving self, right up to the time that I put her in her carrier for the last time.

I took this photo of Rocky the morning of his passing. He was lying under my bed. I had to use a high ASA and the exposure time was over a second.

It doesn't hurt today to look at the photos and write these words, not like it would have even yesterday. Things are getting better. But the usual political crap does not seem as important to me, not now. I don't have the reserves of emotion to be outraged at those assholes in Federal and state government and the putzim who are running so hard to be the leader of a government they all pretend to loathe.

Finally, I want to express my gratitude to you, Gentle Reader. I received a lot of supportive and gracious comments about the passing of Gracie and Rocky. They were of comfort. Thank you so very much.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

But I don't care too much about that, not today. I went with a friend to put her cat, Rocky, down. She went with me yesterday for Gracie. It's a little easier to go with someone else to put their animal down than it is to put your own to sleep, but not by much.

Rocky was losing control of his back legs. What started out as a slight limp was getting worse. It got to the point that he could barely get around. So it was time.

Rocky; September, 1998- February 21, 2012

Rocky was a Maine Coon. Like a lot of his breed, he was a one-person cat. I wasn't that person, but my friend, who bottle-fed him from when he was a tiny kitten, was that person.

Monday, February 20, 2012

She had a lump on her jaw, so I took her in to the vet's office less than two hours ago. The vet diagnosed the lump as as cancer. The vet noted that a couple teeth were starting to loosen. That's probably why Gracie had lost interest in eating dry food, which she loved. Between that and her arthritis, her prognosis was not good at all.

It was time. I stayed with her as they put her to sleep. I owed her that much.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

I am not passing judgment on the circumstance of the use here, just the fact that Group A was going to fly a spy drone over Property B. I believe that it should be completely legal to shoot down or to blind spy drones and the the operators of the drones should be sued for invasion of privacy. Following a jury trial, the drone operators ought to be put in the stocks and the populace should be encouraged to pelt them with rotten vegetables.

I've been going shooting recently with a friend who has just gotten into handgunning. She is in the senior cohort of the baby-boomers and she never was terribly interested in guns. But she went shooting and got her permit. She has found that it is very relaxing to go to the range and shoot off a box of cartridges.

So it came time for her to decide on a first gun. Like a number of women I know, she doesn't care for automatics. The main issue is drawing back the slide, which can be a problem. Hand size is also an issue, as is weight. She didn't want a revolver that was too heavy, for they become tiring to hold. I recommended that she not get one that was too light, for recoil is fatiguing over a range session. She wanted a revolver that she could use for target shooting as well as personal protection. Which kind of meant a good old .38 or .357. Another issue was how hard it was to cock the hammer for single-action shooting and pull through the trigger for double-action shooting. The salesman at Hoffman's was very patient with her, never condescending and he showed her just about every .38 and .357 they had in the smaller sizes.

We went to the range this week and sighted it in, which was easy as, right out of the box, it shot to point of aim at 21' with Winchester white box .38s. She thought it was easy to shoot and that the gun wasn't as snappy as my 2" revolver.

She's pretty pleased. I'd like to see her get some more training, as I think she could become an excellent shot.

The other things is that in going shooting with her every couple of weeks, I've seen my own accuracy noticeably improve. There's a lesson there for me, somewhere.

Here's my suggestion: The "Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine" should go fuck themselves. I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on the Internet, but I find it hard to believe that eating a hamburger would immediately trigger a heart attack.

More to the point of this post, there are certain things called "personal responsibility" and "acting like a grown-up". Adults are responsible for their own actions. If people want to go to a restaurant and eat a quadruple-bacon-cheeseburger and french fries which have been deep-fried in lard, that is their choice. The goddamn nanny doctors should just shut their yaps.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

A 3" five-shot revolver in either .41 Special, .44 Special or .45 Colt.

The .41 won't happen, as manufacturers would be afraid that some nimrod would put them into his great-grandpa's .41 Colt and blow up the gun. A .41 would be wicked pisser, as it would be a moderately powerful concealed carry round and the diameter of the cylinder would be less than a .44 or .45. It probably could be built on a revolver the size of a K-frame.

Charter Arms supposedly is coming out with the "Classic Bulldog" with a 3" barrel. I guess I'll just have to see about that one.

That's good news for everyone from farmers and motorists to pilots, but you've got to imagine that the greedy fuckers behind LightSquared have at least a six pack of high-priced lawyers who are geared up to fight this in court. This is why:

Other than that, Я ничего не имею. I had stuff to do for most of the day, and other than flipping on the Whitney Houston is Still Dead Channel*, I haven't paid any attention to the news or the blogs. On the WHISD Channel, there was a news crawl that the bond ratings of several European countries have been downgraded. In a rational universe, one might think that of more significance than the transportation arrangements for the corpse of a formerly popular singer, but that's not the world which we inhabit.
_______________________AKA "Good Morning America".

The right-wing of the GOP, which now seems to be the center of the party, would probably repeal the 19th Amendment if they could get away with it. I have no doubt that there are some elements in the GOP which would happily restore the old rule that married women were chattel.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

That's basically how many homeowners will be helped by the banksters taking a haircut on the mortgages they hold. Under the terms of the settlement, the banks will reduce the balance owned on underwater mortgages* by $17 billion. The total amount of "underwater" balance nationwide is $700 billion. $17 billion is, in comparison, not even a drop in the bucket.

For closing their eyes to mortgage fraud and then engaging in their own acts of fraud in the foreclosure mills, the banks effectively will pay a fine of $2,000 per mortgage. They will pay nothing for loading up mortgages with excessive fees or overcharging for insurance.

She had one hell of a set of pipes and for whatever reasons or personal demons, she threw that talent away for drugs.

Update, 2/13/12: If Frothy and the Cylon had gotten into a gunfight on Sunday, I doubt if anyone would have heard a word of it on the Monday morning news shows. GMA, at least for the first 30 minutes, transformed itself into the Whitney Houston Memorial Channel. I say "30 minutes", because that was all that we could stand. "Tragic case of entertainer who loses his/her career over drugs and dies early"-- haven't we seen this goddamned movie before? Yeah, so she got into drugs, married an alleged scumbag, et cetera, et cetra.

That doesn't pass the So What Test. You can go into every neighborhood in this country and find at least one kid who had a shitload of potential, if not actually starting to do something with it, and then that kid got into drugs or drinking or gambling or some other addiction and then proceeded to toss his or her life away. I'll bet that in everyone's extended family, you can find someone like that.

It's a tragedy for her mother, her daughter and her friends. And I can understand the celebrity news channels going batshit over this. But as for any serious news network, if they have devoted more than two minutes to this story, their editors and on-air reporters should be flogged with heated barbed-wire whips.

It works this way: Horseflies see horizontally-polarized light. Vertical stripes mess up the flies' vision. The most efficient stripe width for screwing up the ability of the flies to see happens to be the width of the stripes on zebras.

If the Catholic church was not a major religious body, they would have been the subject of RICO prosecutions and a hell of a lot of those clowns now rattling their mouths about contraception would, instead, be residing inside of Federal crossbar hotels.

$25 billion to let them of the hook for the most massive fraudulent scheme in history. $1,500 to be paid to people who were screwed out of their houses, probably most of them by the use of forged documents.

Whenever there is a conflict between liberty and the ability of some company to make a buck, liberty will always lose. Liberty doesn't create jobs. Liberty doesn't put bribes campaign contributions into the hands of politicians. Freedom doesn't enrich vulture capitalists.

So we have American companies continually coming up with innovative ways to spy on American citizens. They do so because there is money in creating new and improved CopsEyes. The moral and ethical issues are not of their concern for corporations, like money*, are completely amoral constructs. They have no morals and no souls.

If you care about individual freedom and personal privacy, some days if feels as though you're looking out over a sea of approaching zombies, you're down to your last three magazines and you do not have a River Tam to call upon.
_______________________________________* Or Rmoney.

And so that war becomes the sole province of the historians, it no longer belongs to the participants.

The destruction wreaked by the Great War took over seventy years to settle out and arguably has not finished reverberating. A war that began when one empire (Austro-Hungarian) sought to punish a smaller nation (Serbia) with a brief war led to the destruction of four empires (German, Ottoman, Imperial Russian and Austro-Hungarian). It led to the eventual creation of the state of Israel. The carnage and cost of the war effectively ended France as a global military power and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. It led to the end in Europe of nations that were effective monarchies, the ones that remain are essentially ceremonial figureheads and tourist attractions. And, due not in any small part to the vindictiveness of the French, it led to the most industrialized genocide yet known.

Now there is nobody left to say "I was there."

Whether due to the number of still-living veterans or the existence of far superior and far more voluminous motion-picture footage, the Second World War is the one that people talk more about. But it can be argued that the two wars were really one extended conflict with a 21 year cease-fire inbetween the two periods of conflict. I disagree with that, only to the extent that it treats both wars as being inevitable. I hold that war is only inevitable to the extent that hubris and folly supplant wisdom.

The creation of the European Union and of the Euro currency were all aftereffects of the First and Second World Wars. The idea was to bind the states of Europe close enough economically so that it was in no one nation's interest to settle their differences with their neighbors by the rifle.

Romney has a shitloat of money, both his own and the cash that his predatory capitalist buddies have been dumping into Mitt's super-pac. Team Mittens is going around the nation, telling Republicans that he alone has the money to bury the others in advertising buys and that since he's going to win anyway, everyone should shut up, be a bunch of good little Germans, and fall into line behind Mitt the Inevitable.

Except that the GOP's conservative base apparently despises Romney and they made their displeasure known last night.

As others have pointed out, Romney won Minnesota in 2008 and last night, even with T-Paw's endorsement, he came in a distant third.

A long nominating contest isn't, of itself, bad. It can energize the members of a party. The protracted battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama didn't hurt him. Of course, things were different four years ago. McCain committed a serious unforced error when he listened to his groin and chose the Wasilla Whackaloon as his running mate. The near-collapse of the banking sector hurt McCain, as he flailed around in response. And the level of animosity between the center-right and left-wing Democrats in 2008 was far lower than the animosity that I see inside the GOP. There is really a war going on between what I would call the party of Hoover and the party of the Confederacy.

Santorum would be beaten like a gong in the general election. I don't think that point is arguable.

The problem for Romney is a modern one. Historically, candidates have sought to pander to the party faithful and then, once the nomination has been secured, move to the center of the spectrum to work on the independents and the moderates in the opposing party. A candidate could say some truly obnoxious things in Dubuque in January and all that they'd face is maybe some ad quoting him in September, where some deep-voiced announcer read the quote.

But those days are gone, thanks to digital hard drives. Every word that a presidential candidate speaks before a camera ends up on a hard drive for the other party. Everything that Romney says in order to over the right-wing voters who, for good reasons, don't trust him will be thrown back in Romney's face this fall. Every hard word he has for immigrants, minorities, the poor, workers, and women will be used against him. Stephen Colbert's attack ad will, by comparison, look like a love tap.

The Obama campaign and its allies might not even have to work that hard. The polls seem to be indicating that the more people across the country learn of Romney, the less they like him. As somebody once put it, Romney looks the the robotic guy who fired your father without feeling a qualm. Romney comes across as the kind of decent-looking guy who, if you had a drink with him, would roofie your drink, steal your wallet, rape you, slit your throat, ransack your home, torch the place and then leave with a spring in his step and a song in his heart.

Mitt-- Separated at birth? --Ted

And you can bet that you'll see ads alluding to that this fall, that is, if Gingrich doesn't run them before then.

How do we protect ourselves from the careerists, the "professionals" who know that they will advance by going along with whatever insanity that the leadership demands? How do we reward the men and women who would dare tell the generals that their vaunted strategy is a failure? One of the big lessons after Vietnam was how much it was apparent that the senior officer corps had been drinking the Kool-aid of the "light at the end of the tunnel". There were books by other officers excoriating the officer corps for not telling truth to power. Dereliction of Duty is on the recommended reading list for senior army officers.

And yet, here we are, once again, being lied to by the senior military officers. Even more reprehensible, they may be lying to themselves, as well. For they know that standing up and saying "fucking a, this war is going to hell" won't get them an additional star or a better assignment. While Luftwaffe General Wolfram von Richthofen once observed that Hitler treated the German General Staff as "highly-paid NCOs", it seems to me that there is something in the Army's culture (if not all of the services) whereby the senior officers transform themselves into such.

It was only ten years ago, when Mitt Romney was running for governor of Massachusetts. He supported the use of the "morning-after pill", he supported government subsidized abortions, he supported comprehensive sex education in schools and the agreed with the Rowe v. Wade decision.

But two years later, things changed. Mittens set his sights on a better job. He immediately tacked to the right, discarding everything that he said he believed in[1] He pretty much began phoning it in as governor to plot his run for the presidency and he began flip-flopping faster than a loose screen door in a windstorm.

Rick Santorum may be both misogynistic and a homophobic and Ron Paul may be a racist old conspiracy whackaloon, but this is incontestable: Both of those guys believe in something. They have a core to their political identities. Romney, on the other hand, has no core, no center. Politically, Romney is like a dense fog, in that it looks like there is something there, but all that is really there is mist and vapor.

The only thing that Romney believes in is that he should be in charge. What he would do, other than figure out some why to enable his predatory capitalist buddies to further loot the country, is anyone's guess. His best argument is the unspoken one of "I came in second last time around, so now, by GOP tradition, it's my turn."

I am not voting for whoever wins the GOP nomination. So maybe that colors my view of ol' Willard. But I fail to see how any Republican could ever think of voting for Flip-Flop Mitt. He has a proven track record of being a man who will say anything whatsoever and do anything it takes in order to win the next election. When Romney gives a political speech, you can bet the farm that every word coming out of his mouth is pandering bullshit. And you can also be assured that when it becomes convenient for him, Romney will disavow everything that he just told you he believed.

Going into a political fight with Mitt Romney at your side is like marching into battle allied with the Italian army. The rank and file of the GOP are utter fools if they put their trust in Romney.

(H/T)
________________[1] Other than praying to God and Bain Capital, that is.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Chrysler ran an ad about coming back during the halftime of the Super Bowl, saying that it was "halftime in America" as well.

Of course, Karl Rove and the rest of the Right Wing Outrage Machine took that to be political. Probably because they were pushing back in 2008 and 2009 to take Chrysler (and GM) into Chapter 7 and dismember both companies,[1] throwing millions of more people out of work.[2]

That didn't happen because two American presidents[3] stood up to the Randistas and called "bullshit" on a cabal of fools who were willing to destroy a major chunk of this country's industrial base, just because their ideology[4] told them to.

What Clint Eastwood had to say was this:

"There is no spin in that ad. On this I am certain. l am certainly not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama. It was meant to be a message about just about job growth and the spirit of America. I think all politicians will agree with it. I thought the spirit was OK."

Not "put Americans back to work". Not "Turn the economy around". Not "improve the educational system for America's youth". McConnell's sole objective for the last four years has been to destroy this president, to make it impossible to do anything that would help this country pull out of the Great Recession.

Once you realize that, then the Wingnut outrage over the Chrysler ad makes complete sense.
____________________________[1] No doubt that Bain and Mitt the Cylon would have figured out how to make an obscene profit on that catastrophe.
[2] When you factor in all of the suppliers and sub-contractors that would have had to shut down, as a result.
[3] One of them being Rove's boss.
[4] As well as their pathological hatred of the idea that anyone doing a blue-collar job could be a member of the middle class.

It is not surprising that Russia and China would back the Syrians by vetoing the UN resolution. Beyond the geopolitical reasons, such as the Russian naval base at Tartus in Syria, there are what one might call "restive populations" in both countries. Both Russia and China have shown little hesitation to use a heavy hand against their own citizens. The best way that they can preserve their own right to slaughter their own people is to ensure that other despotic nations are free to massacre their own citizens whenever it suits them to do so.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

She likes the snub-nosed revolver the best. However, with a Ruger Blackhawk (.357, .38s loaded, 6" barrel), she hit the center of the target 6 times out of six shots. She found the Blackhawk to be heavy, which is no surprise. The cylinder of a .357 Blackhawk is roughly the same diameter as the one in a .45 Cimmaron, so there is a lot more steel there. She shot a PPK/s and hit the center with that. After about 45 minutes of the two of us shooting, her accuracy degraded all to hell, for she was tired.

You'd not think that nine-hundredths of an inch would be that significant. The Federal SWCs are no doubt a good defense and hunting load, but I imagine that getting shot with a lead flat-nosed 250-grain .45 bullet that's moving a little bit slower than the SWCs is not something that one lightly shrugs off.

To change the subject, a phone-banker from the NRA called me a few mornings ago to plead with me to send money to help defeat President Obama. I told her no and asked her to not call back. Personally, I think that the NRA is smoking crack if they truly believe that Flip-Flop Mitt will be any kind of a defender of the 2nd Amendment. Like Rudy Giuliani, ol' Willard M. Romney only became a so-called friend of gun rights when he wanted to step out on the national political stage.

Color me: "Unimpressed." I doubt if there is a person out there who will be convinced that this was nothing other than a massive cave by the Komenies. They first kowtowed to the Christian Taliban on stem-cell research and on Planned Parenthood. Now they have again folded before a more powerful backlash.

The Komenies knew exactly what they were doing when they did it. So now they have the worst of both worlds. They have now pissed all over the shoes of the Christian Taliban, which will regard this reversal as a betrayal. And those who reacted with fury and who have supported Planned Parenthood will not be so forgetful as the news cycle will be.

In the culture wars, the Komenies have turned out to be as reliable an ally as the Italians were during the Second World War.

Or, if you like, they are channeling Capt. Renault:

But I think it is more than that. This is just a tactical retreat. The Komenies will try again. Next time around, they'll just cut a grant here, a grant there. So in a few years, the Komenies will not be giving a dime to Planned Parenthood. And I will bet that the Komenies are privately relaying that exact strategy to the Christian Taliban. Remember, what the Komenies told Planned Parenthood was this: "Don't bother applying for any more grants, because we're going to reject them". All they did was now tell Planned Parenthood that they could continue to apply. Big fucking whoop.

The more I think on this, the more I believe that this so-called reversal is designed to appease the Komenies' corporate sponsors. Corporations do not want to receive bad publicity or blowback from donating to charities. All of the companies carrying Komenie-pink merchandise probably got an earful over the last two days.

Worse for the Komanies: They are no longer above the fray. They are no longer critically untouchable. They've muddied their own reputation and that kind of mud isn't washable. People will be taking shots at Brinker's half-million dollar salary. They will be paying attention to how (in)efficiently the Komen Foundation is, how much they spend on administrative expenses and where that money goes (other than Brinker's ginormous salary).

In essence, they have exchanged a bulletproof vest for a large target.

The Komenies are weasels. They cannot be trusted. I hope PP blows the whistle on them whenever the Komenies decline to renew a grant.

The Komen/Christian Taliban Foundation for Doing Nothing But Raising Money terminated all of those grants as of last November. They tried to keep it quiet and largely succeeded, that is, until the defunding of Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood did not go quietly and now people are starting to kick over all of the Komenies' rocks.

As far as Planned Parenthood goes, Mayor Mike has stepped up and pledged to donate $250,000 in matching funds to PP. He will match ever grant of "new money", which I take to mean that if a person who has not previously donated to PP does so, he'll match your donation. I've blasted Bloomberg numerous times in this blog for his megalomania, his nanny-state inclinations and his revocation of two voter-approved term limits propositions so that he could buy a third term of mayor. But he can do good once in awhile and he has this time.

So if you've never donated to Planned Parenthood before, do so and let Bloomberg double your donation.

And say that you didn't feel like bringing your laptop along. So you go into an Internet cafe, where you check your e-mail on AOL or Comcast. And you bring a cheap headset with you so you can use voice-over-IP to talk to your family and friends. And maybe you don't really like people watching you write semi-porn e-mails to your lover.

They have also been whining about how unfair it is for people to complain and not give them money because they chose to jump in on one side of a hot-button fight. Again, tough shit. If you pick a side in a war, you have no cause to complain when the folks on the other side commence shooting at you.

This is pure insanity. By their logic, they would be permitted to interfere with the reception of broadcast radio because the receivers aren't licensed. It's bullshit. We, the American taxpayers, paid to orbit the GPS constellation. We pay to maintain and operate it. Part of the reason that nobody questions the cost of doing so is that GPS is a public good. A hell of a lot of cars come with GPS, so do most cell phones. Call 9-1-1- on a modern cell phone and GPS tells the operator where you are. When you drive by a farm and you see a modern tractor out there, sowing or applying fertilizer or whatnot, that tractor is using GPS. GPS allows farmers to precisely control where they plant, fertilize and so on. Freight companies have been able to greatly improve both efficiency and their ability to respond to urgent changes because they know where their trucks are at all times, by GPS.

This is where AOPA, EAA, ATA (Air Transport Assoc., American Trucking Assoc.), AFB, AAA and all of the other industry associations whose members are heavy users of GPS had better get off the dime and get to work blocking this.

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